Citizenship and the emotional politics of belonging: negotiating boundaries in the school setting

This article discusses the emotional micro-politics of belonging and the ways this is negotiated and contested in the everyday space of the school by young people themselves. To do so, I draw on Clark’s micro-politics of emotions and Hochschild’s feeling rules to explore how power and status determine how everyday citizenship boundaries are drawn and felt. The empirical data come from 14 focus groups conducted in three secondary schools in Flanders, with 89 students aged between 13 and 19 years old. The results show that a sense of belonging was often constrained by a politics of exclusion influenced by societal norms and power dynamics, both inside and outside the school setting, which fostered feelings of fear, mistrust, resentment, and misrecognition among the youth. These experiences cultivated collective emotions and a dynamic sense of belonging, which involved forming social bonds with peers and teachers with whom they shared similarities, but also with people who were willing to embrace the differences.